Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson by Christina Snyder (review)

christina snyder concludes this book with a timely lesson from its subject, the Choctaw Academy at Great Crossings, Kentucky. American Indians, African Americans, and European Americans who resided and worked there during that school's quarter-century existence "remind us that progress cannot be taken for granted." Invoking an Indigenous model of time, Snyder warns against Americans' all-too-characteristic amnesia over "unpleasant historical truths" like those inherited from the Jacksonian era: "intolerance, exclusion, and racial injustice." With the promise of liberty still eluding many Americans, "circling back to old paths" just might provide "the opportunity to cultivate change." Great Crossings is a remarkable study of how a road "paved by collaboration and alliance" in the aftermath of the American Revolution became "bloodied and then divided" in the Age of Jackson (314–17).

The prodigious archival research and creative analytical narrative that went into this history of Choctaw Academy would alone be quite an accomplishment, but the particular way that Snyder explains both the rise and fall of this forgotten institution ensures that Great Crossings will become a landmark book in Indigenous studies. By closely examining various individuals who came together at a boarding school started by the Choctaw Nation and run by Richard Mentor Johnson, Snyder fully captures parallel and intersecting dimensions of their lives. During the 1820s Peter Pitchlyn and other Choctaw leaders recognized non-Native education as a new instrument for serving their people, but they objected to the proselytizing that accompanied schools established by religious organizations. Johnson meanwhile transitioned from his reputation as a frontier soldier and War of 1812 hero to become a slave-owning planter and politician. This unlikely convergence of pathways resulted in Choctaw Academy being founded about a dozen miles northwest of Lexington, Kentucky.

Choctaw Academy at Great Crossings was a community that embodied a promising vision of the future but that succumbed all too quickly to the dragging effects of its own time. With lucid analysis and luminous prose, Snyder explains how profound contradictions in antebellum American society shaped life and learning at this multiracial community in the upper South. In Johnson's relationship with his slave Julia Chinn and with their two daughters, we learn about an enslaved plantation wife heavily involved in running the academy and intimately influential in shaping her white partner-owner's vision as benevolent patriarch and reformist politician. Intertwined with the story of Johnson's family are contradictions also abounding inside the school, where by the mid-1830s nearly two hundred students from different Native nations resided at one time. While the US War Department saw schooling as a means of pacification and assimilation, American Indian supporters of the academy saw it as an additional strategy in their ongoing struggle to retain land and sovereignty. And while anxious whites tried to thicken racial boundaries amid accelerating socioeconomic change, both Indians and African Americans drew on middle-class identity and privilege to challenge mounting racism. Although both Indian gentlemen and black ladies defied in a similar way the judgments made by powerful men like Johnson, each group nonetheless had its own reason for standing apart from each other. Clashes inside Great Crossings, as Snyder closely demonstrates, "reveal what is often hidden in histories of antebellum America—a social world shared by whites, blacks, and Indians, one shaped partly by the intimacy created by slavery" (114).

At the heart of Snyder's inquiry is her attention to how Indigenous students and their families confronted government policy that was shifting ideologically toward racialization and removal. In defense of their political identity and personal integrity against this deepening threat, pupils initiated ways to challenge how they were treated and what they were taught at Choctaw Academy. To explore this encounter, Snyder vividly captures the school's daily routine, curriculum, residential condition, and social life. The flight of Anishinaabe teacher John Jones and Miami pupil George Hunt with two enslaved nieces of Julia was a significant moment in the school...